Abstract
Even though scholars have pointedly embraced ethical matters in music education within the global context, there has been relatively little attention paid to the concept of cosmopolitanism. While keeping in mind that the concept of cosmopolitanism is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that can be read and implemented in many ways, the aim of the current narrative inquiry is to highlight the significance of the human connection—a notable feature of moral cosmopolitanism, and by extension, cosmopolitanism from below—inherent in, and possibly the most prominent aspect of music education practices, regardless of their position in the formal–informal spectrum of such practices. In this context, music education becomes a lifestyle—whose participants cultivate their ethical sensitivities toward human connection—that has the capacity to alleviate the human sufferings occurring globally. By telling the life stories of Behzad Khiavchi, the lead musician of a trans-Iranian band, this article aims to highlight the cosmopolitan collective imperative, a fundamental characteristic of music education, as the harbinger of a more caring world.
A snapshot of a period of a month in the second decade of the 21st century reaffirms a world of extreme violence and hate crimes, volatile economic stability, environmental calamities, and crumbling democracies. Arts educators, as human beings living in this world, have the luxury and ability to affect the quality of life of human beings. My starting point, then, is to talk about human integrity and dignity through a cosmopolitan music-making and learning in the case of urban Iran, where music education is a lifestyle, a positive way of thinking about the world: loving the music but loving the people even more—not a thing to do but a thing to be.
Cosmopolitanism in the context of the current research
Defining cosmopolitanism is difficult; it is often unreservedly dismissed because of its common association with what Appadurai (2013) calls “an elite privilege and debating it likewise an elite luxury” (p. 197). Bradley (2006) highlights that there are many nuances inherent in this term that are not always positive because of the 20th century anti-colonial movements, to the extent that Bates (2014) remarks “this rootless, global outlook is itself a distinctly cultural/social prescription whereby being an educated person is synonymous with being cosmopolitan and whereby provincialism is equated with ignorance” (p. 313, emphasis in original). Bates’ point resonates with the first two definitions of cosmopolitanism in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: (1) “having worldwide rather than limited or provincial scope or bearing” and (2) “having wider international sophistication” (“cosmopolitan,” 2018). Thus, this term becomes overlooked or dismissed altogether as elitist and implicating a discriminatory position against people who, for instance, economically or sociologically do not have the means or luxury to travel easily and gain eclectic “international sophistication.” Nevertheless, there is still merit in grappling with the concept of cosmopolitanism. While the first two definitions of the Merriam-Webster dictionary are problematic, the second two definitions open up a space to challenge the utter dismissal of the term: (3) “composed of persons, constituents, or elements from all or many parts of the world” and (4) “found in most parts of the world and under varied ecological conditions.”
These last two definitions discuss what is and can be shared among people “under varied ecological conditions.” In a sense, regardless of living conditions and environmental differences, humans in the world may partake in similar activities and share similar categorical values such as the need for resources, shelter, and safety, and what Taylor (1992) acknowledges as “human dignity” (p. 27). Nonetheless, there are also objectionable and destructive attitudes and behaviors shared among many people that are, unfortunately, also utterly human, including racism, cruelty to one another, and extreme cases of self-centeredness. The notion of “humanity” inherent in cosmopolitanism may be implemented as a category for either inclusion or exclusion in music education and politics the world over, “with underlying premise” that “everyone shares in it” (Taylor, 1992, p. 27). Due to the complexity of the term and its myriad connotations (political, economic, moral, cultural, and educational cosmopolitanism) (Hansen, 2011), I contextualize cosmopolitanism’s meaning for the purpose of this article.
I adopt a juxtaposition of Appiah’s (2007) moral cosmopolitanism and Appadurai’s (2013) “cosmopolitanism from below” to offer a cosmopolitanism that, instead of implying a privileged position, aims to create a desired “geography of the global by the strategic extension of local cultural horizons, not in order to dissolve or deny the intimacies of the local, but in order to combat its indignities and exclusions” (p. 198). In this sense, cosmopolitanism deeply engages with “the politics of hope” (p. 198), “the capacity to aspire” (p. 213), and with being utterly human.
Appiah (2007) considers two components to cosmopolitanism: (1) obligation to others and (2) taking into account the “value not just of human life but of particular human lives” (p. xv). Deliberating on the concept of value, Appiah acknowledges that most of the conflicts the world over result, not from disagreement about a certain value, but despite it, “the disagreement is about [the value’s] significance . . . because we have shared horizons of meaning” (pp. 80–81). In Appiah’s view, cosmopolitanism suggests the challenge of difference of meanings over a certain value—or as Hansen (2011) suggests, “capacities” (p. 7)—rather than the solution to this difference. Appiah posits that cosmopolitanism is not necessarily about accepting difference but about getting used to it, and “once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not yet share” (p. 97).
Appadurai (2013) holds a similar sentiment on the significance of value in his concept of cosmopolitanism from below; it “could belong to anyone and apply in any circumstances” (p. 198). Appadurai also acknowledges that one must start “close to home and build on the practices of the local, the everyday, and the familiar” (p. 198). However, he cautions that these practices require one to expand “the boundaries of the everyday” (p. 198) through a myriad of political directions permeated by a “politics of hope” (p. 198) and “the capacity to aspire” (p. 213). In this sense, The practices that enhance the capacity to aspire draw on the habit of imagining possibilities, rather than giving in to the probabilities of externally imposed change. Imagining possible futures, concrete in their immediacy as well as expansive in their long-term horizons, inevitably thrives on communicative practise that extend one’s own cultural horizons . . . they gain plausible access to the stories and experiences of others—and not just of adversity and suffering, but also of movement and accomplishment. (p. 213, emphasis in original)
In sum, the cosmopolitanism discussed in this article aims to unravel what is specifically human about the music education practices of an Iranian rock musician whose locality—like a pendulum swaying from one geography to another—holds firm to a local cultural identity and musical value that stretches the boundaries of what one may think of as music education.
Music education after the 1979 revolution: an overview
Elsewhere I have extensively discussed the contemporary history of music education in Iran after the 1979 Revolution (Niknafs, 2016, 2017a, 2017c, 2018). Music has never been a part of an official discourse in public education in Iran and engaging with music has always been a precarious endeavor. Throughout the years, musical engagement has been considered sinful and outright illegal, but some specific genres gradually became legal and sanctioned by the state. Nowadays music occupies a curious place in the official discourse, with female singers having implicit permission to finally perform as soloists, and genres of music representing the West can be heard through official channels. It is difficult to unravel all the intricacies of the position of music in this article, as its production heavily relies on sociopolitical, economic, historical, and international events. Specifically, rock music rarely received the official attention it deserved—its national and international representation was deemed as “Westoxification” (gharbzadegi) and resistance against the status quo. A significant element in this narrative is also the absence of music as a subject in public education. Except for a few public high schools in major cities in Iran educating musicians in particular, generally public schools are still banned from introducing music as a subject. Nevertheless, some private schools have introduced music, and a plethora of cultural centers and music institutes offer music lessons, master classes, and public lectures on music.
Mode of inquiry
Narrative inquiry as the methodological framework
Throughout human history, storytelling has always been a mode of understanding an occurrence, and a means of expressing thoughts and feelings about an event, and creating meaning out of an experience (Bowman, 2006; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006; Leavy, 2013). According to two prominent narrative inquirers in the field of music education, Margaret Barrett and Sandra Stauffer (2012), “Story is also a means by which we might trouble certainty, and raise questions concerning the ‘taken-for-granted’” (p. 1). Given that “people are storytellers by nature” (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998, p. 7), narratives can illuminate individuals’ inner worlds (Lieblich et al., 1998), be a way of knowing, and a mode of inquiry (Barrett & Stauffer, 2009). In the current research, similar to Kallio’s (2015) research methodology, I applied all three concurrently. The current research stories the participant’s composition of his story while simultaneously examines the ways in which the stories are told as a mode of knowing—to experience the world while making sense out of the experiences. Moreover, as a methodological framework, I conducted interviews, engaged with participant’s social media and public persona, and maintained rigorous engagement with the news of the rock music scene in Iran.
Narrative inquiry in the present research
The researcher’s positionality in the research
I have elsewhere examined my own music education as a born and raised female Iranian musician, music educator, and scholar (Niknafs, 2017b). My official education started only a few years after the 1979 Revolution in a northern city in Iran amid the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). I studied music with the sincere help of my parents—an 8-hr drive to and from Tehran for piano lessons—cultural osmosis through private friend and family gatherings, official soundscapes of national radio and TV, and singing revolutionary songs at school. Unofficially, my music education occurred through smuggled “Western” music and Persian Pop, unofficial rock music, and eventually through the World Wide Web. However, I have never felt that it was lacking from my upbringing and education. Nonetheless, when I left the country to “legitimately” pursue music education as a course of study, I realized that the context of my and so many of my fellow Iranian students’ music education was a holistic music education (Niknafs, 2017b)—not necessarily simply informal or community music, terms generally positioned against formal and school music education in the global-north-centric discourse of music education. It went beyond musicking (Small, 1998). It was, as I also have argued elsewhere (Niknafs, 2017a), broader than only having music as a subject matter. It was a necessary part of our cultural education (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). Nevertheless, according to Jorgensen (2018), Among the central problems in music education in our time are those arising out of the othering of difference in music education. Northern philosophical perspectives on music education in West and East have too often othered, marginalized, and excluded those from countries in the Southern Hemisphere due to such problems as distance, language, and the continuing legacy of European and American colonization in music education around the world. (p. 115)
Thus, I have always been required to position my music education and what I mean by it in frameworks not necessarily suited to the kinds practiced in Iran. Therefore, by conducting the current relational narrative inquiry (Stauffer, 2009), I tell my own story. Echoing Lieblich et al. (1998), “by studying and interpreting self-narratives, the researcher can access not only the individual identity and its systems of meaning but also the teller’s culture and social world” (p. 9). By telling stories about rock musicians in Iran, and unraveling the sociocultural, political, and historical aspects of these musicians’ music education, I intend to tell a story to alter the ways we understand everyday music education and bring stories forth that for so long were shadowed (Fine, 1994; Nichols, 2013) —what Allsup (2016) identifies as residing “outside of the discursive field of music and music education proper” (p. xii).
Collection of the data
The current research is part of a larger narrative research focusing on three questions: (1) “what are the characteristics and lived experiences of Iranian rock musicians?” (2) “what personal, sociopolitical, and historical circumstances do participants’ life stories represent?” and (3) “given the ambivalent nature of such music in the country, what is the role of music education in this context?” (Niknafs, 2017c, pp. 120–121). This article examines a particular feature of an Iranian rock musician’s music education, Behzad Khiavchi, which speaks directly to Appiah’s (2007) moral cosmopolitanism: “Cosmopolitanism, as we’ve been conceiving it, starts with what is human in humanity” (p. 134).
In the summer of 2012, I was introduced to a music video called Ye chizi bede be man (“Hit me with anything”) by B-Band. I remember acutely how that video put me in a state of sweet despair: strong and raw emotions. The music itself plunged me into some familiar yet murky feelings. It was energetic and accessible; edgy indeed. The singer, Behzad, was from the band Sarakhs that I knew from my bittersweet memories of college, of unofficial rock music, of attending underground parties in Tehran, and a nonchalant sense of being fearless, confident, and supported by likeminded youth. I have followed B-Band’s music ever since and decided to venture on a narrative inquiry to understand Iranian rock musicians’ ways of learning, approaching, and living through their music. I contacted the band through their website and told them about my research project. I received a warm and welcoming email immediately from Behzad agreeing to be part of the research. After about 5.5 hr of interview conversations in Persian that occurred on the phone between Seattle and Toronto and later translated into English by me, a close and comprehensive investigation of the band’s website, social media, and music, and close communication with Behzad as the co-creator of the present research and immersing myself into his narratives as “the study of experience as story” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 477), the current research came to fruition. Most significantly, by conducting this narrative inquiry and a close analysis of the stories, I wanted to interrogate Behzad’s intentions and language: “how and why incidents are storied . . . what cultural resources does the story draw on, or take for granted” (Kohler-Reissman, 2008, p. 11)? I use Behzad’s real name with his permission; he is a public figure and a known musician. However, I use pseudonyms when referring to Behzad’s friends and people he mentions throughout our conversations for matters of confidentiality.
Behzad Khiavchi: a moral cosmopolitan
Behzad’s beginning
I was 5 or 6 years old when the war ended . . . During midnights or early mornings we would wake up by the torturous sound of sirens . . . I wasn’t aware that every second there would have been a chance of a rocket landing on our heads and killing us. I was just happy that we are all running to a shelter, which was basically the basement of every house. I was happy and excited to go downstairs as soon as possible to see my friends. They had made a cozy and warm place in the shelter with lots of food and snacks. As a child, you don’t really get the horrors . . . But one day, I remember that a rocket hit our local Sâzmân-e-âb [Water Organization]. Apparently, the bomb had not worked properly, but the aftershock was massive, even when the organization was a few blocks away from our place . . . I remember the moment when the rocket hit the ground and our windows became mere shards. We used to have heavy and thick red curtains in our home that my father closed without any reason around 9 or 10 a.m. that morning. My older brother was in front of TV watching the math lessons.
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Around five or six minutes later, I’m not sure what happened but I couldn’t hear anything afterwards. Everything became slow-motion. My brother was suddenly running; I saw the curtains went up to the ceiling and just stayed there. All the windows also came to pieces. And then a heavy raid of people running everywhere and also to our home. My father ran in front of our house so that people wouldn’t come in. There were two kinds of people those days whenever there was a bomb hitting somewhere: those who would come for help, and those who would raid the place afterwards and grab anything they could . . . For weeks, we were cleaning the debris from all over our home. Every piece of it could have easily killed us. We were lucky that we stayed alive. It was around the end of the war. The scariest memory I’ve ever had. I also saw the fear in my parents’ eyes. My mother was screaming. A child around that age feels the horror when seeing such a fear from the adults . . . I wasn’t able to understand the situation then as a child, but I can see its aftermath these days. I have nightmares of the war at least once a month. I suddenly wake up and feel there is an earthquake, and everything is trembling—the sky full of dark aeroplanes. An orange dawn appears. All the planes are approaching us and bombarding us. I’m a soldier who has to take care of other people and comrades under the bombardments. I just now realize the effect of those days on me. They all have roots in my childhood.
Born and raised in Tehran in the midst of the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988), Behzad grew up in a music-loving family. His father was an amateur singer and guitar player, and his older brother listened avidly to Iron Maiden and Koorosh Yaghmâi (a well-known Iranian early rock singer before the 1979 Revolution), emulating them by ear on his guitar.
Behzad started as the lead vocalist of a semi-well-known garage band in the north of Tehran called Sarakhs (Fern) comprising three early-20s Tehranies who loved to jam. All three were guitar players, so they collectively decided to change instruments to create more interesting sounds: one stayed with guitar, one decided to play drums, and the other picked up bass. That is how they decided on their instruments—no fuss. The drummer used to work at an official music studio mixing and mastering music such as traditional, folk, or sanctioned Persian pop music, or putting soundtracks over children’s puppet shows for national television. So, the band (at the time the only rock band at that studio) would drag all of its equipment to the studio bein-e-mariz (Persian slang literally meaning between patients, but contextually meaning whenever a client was not in the studio) to record their songs. Waking up at early hours to go to the studio, they wanted both to record their own songs and to listen to other musicians’ live sessions. They also helped with other musicians’ recordings, from assisting with studio labor like setting up the speakers, arranging the cables and microphones, to helping move the instruments in and out of the studio; they were contented to be around that studio. Behzad mentions, “The owners of the studio were around eight or nine years older than us. They were like our older brothers. There was a sense of friendship among us. It wasn’t like the employee-employer relationship. They really took care of us,” emphasizing that “music education is not only about music but deals with ideals of human character and society” (Allsup & Westerlund, 2012, p. 134).
Behzad remembers those days as the best and happiest moments in his life: we would drink coffee or tea early in the morning, then head to the studio. Some people think that if you’re a rocker, you should be a drug addict. But none of our friends were about drugs. The music itself was our drug. The music was our high basically . . .
His remarks echo Heimonen (2012), “music has the potential to touch the inner world of humans, and in terms of education it can nurture the overall growth of people, promote their abilities to critically discuss and collaboratively solve problems” (p. 75).
A forced musical sojourner by choice
Behzad has been in and out of the country many times, living the life of a sojourner in Cyprus, then Canada, and now Seattle, USA. His decision to leave Iran adds to a phenomenon called brain drain (farâr-e-maqzhâ), “emigration of the highly educated elite from the developing countries” (Torbat, 2002, p. 272). The first time Behzad left his home to live away from his family was to attend college in Famagusta, the Northern part of Cyprus, where he studied computer sciences. Ethnically, Behzad and his family are from the Azeri part of the country in the north–west region. Behzad understood Turkish and gradually learned to speak it fluently while living in Cyprus. It was also this move and his band mates’ move to Ukraine that marked the end of their musical adventures together. Nevertheless, Behzad never left his music-making and learning habit. Not considering himself a professional musician, Behzad kept his—as he calls it—hobby of music-making. He mentioned, I didn’t want to make a living out of music. This was a futile idea for me. Any of my friends who wanted to do this quit in the middle of it and started to study other things and follow career paths from which they could earn something. The ones who stayed as professional musicians are complaining about their lives all the time. You cannot make a living out of music, unless you inherit some large amount or win a lottery so that you could spend it on your music. You can’t make a living out of giving concerts either. Even the 4 or 5 most famous rock bands in Iran don’t earn much. Whatever they earn from the ticket sales goes into transportation of the equipment and renting the space.
It seemed that the hobby of music that Behzad talks about, or as Mantie and Smith (2017) aptly call, “avocational involvement with music as an integral part of human condition” (p. 4, emphasis in original), fills a large part of his life. Throughout all of our interviews, Behzad frequently discussed the details of his music-making: how he created lyrics only in Persian, the process of his song-making, the recording strategies, the art works for their music, the details of technology in their sounds, and all in all the people with whom he had been involved musically. Behzad’s openness and generosity toward the details of his music-making indicated a deep investment in music. It seemed to represent more than a mere hobby or amateurism.
Although Behzad does not earn a living from music, nor did he study it in college, he is a professional in the sense that he seems very serious about the way he approaches music learning, singing and song writing, and to my surprise, the people who influence him musically on a day-to-day basis. Music education for Behzad thus becomes “human-specific, not practice-specific” (Allsup, 2016, p. 24). Behzad started with Sarakhs in Tehran, then created a cover band in Cyprus, before forming his now trans-Iranian band, B-Band, while starting another casual band in Seattle that played at local stages, surpassing topographical and identity boundaries and associations. Expanding on his everyday (Appadurai, 2013), depending on the place in which he resides and the people whom he meets, and getting used to his bandmates’ differences (Appiah, 2007), Behzad gained “plausible access to the stories and experiences of others” (Appadurai, p. 213). In this sense, [Behzad] the cosmopolitan . . . wants to remind us of other connections. One connection . . . is the connection not through identity but despite difference. We can respond to art that is not ours; indeed, we can fully respond to “our” art only if we move beyond thinking of it as ours and start to respond to it as art. But equally important is the connection . . . The connection through a local identity is as imaginary as the connection through humanity. (Appiah, 2007, p. 135, emphasis in original)
Behzad’s stories also hint at his privileges as a moral cosmopolitan: his privilege of economic and cultural capital that allowed him to study abroad, the privilege of being a male in the Iranian society that permitted him to metaphorically and literally move more freely within the rock scene, and the privilege of having access to resources necessary to flourish musically. All of these privileges in word and deed render Behzad’s cosmopolitan music education more complex and possibly more problematic to the eyes of those for whom cosmopolitanism equals privilege. However, these advantages should not impede one from understanding an alternate way of looking at music education.
The most interesting event in Behzad’s musical life happened when living in Canada; he put some of his musical ideas on his social media and asked for the public’s opinion. At the time, Behzad did not have a band; he was a one-man show and craved for some music-making moments with peers. One person, in particular, responded to the music with positive feedback: his name was K, and he is now officially B-Band’s drummer and music force. He keeps the scheduling and production of their music in place and is unofficially considered Behzad’s guru. K, on the other hand, was the polar opposite of another well-known Iranian rock pioneer post the 1979 revolution. During the early years of Sarakhs, Behzad had quite a negative working experience with that musician. He has since decided that music is not at all about the music, but about the relationships and human interactions: music is a happy by-product of a rewarding camaraderie. Interestingly, K was also the person taking care of Sarakhs when they interned at Studio Bam in the early days of underground music in Iran. Gradually, K, Behzad, and another Iranian friend of Behzad’s formed B-Band through cyberspace. Because they were not able to rehearse and create their songs physically together, they turned to the Internet and technology. This space became an outlet for their friendships to take shape and their music to evolve.
This event also relates to Behzad’s chosen band’s name as B-Band. The name represents a sly choice that can be read in two different ways. First, B-Band is the name of a drum and a company that manufactures guitar pickups. The name could thus be related to the kind of music the band creates, that aesthetically requires the sound of the electric guitar and drums. Second, if transliterated into the Persian language (unrestrained), it can refer to the band members’ own roots as Iranian place-less rock musicians, or origins of their music not from their homeland, Iran. But when I asked Behzad about the name, he mentioned B-Band could also refer to “without a band,” amalgamating both the Persian word, Bi, meaning without, and the English word, band, as a rock ensemble. Behzad created this name when he did not have anyone with whom to play music but wanted to create this illusion—at least for himself—that he had a band, that he was playing among friends. Wittily, B-Band performs a song called “Imaginary Friends.” Nevertheless, Behzad remarked that he enjoyed multiple reads of their name.
Human connection: a holistic music education
Behzad does not consider himself a professional musician, neither does he consider himself musically literate. He says that unlike his brother and his bandmates in Sarakhs who learned music academically, he never forced himself to learn reading and writing music. This is what he means by academic music: Back in the day there was a private music institute that they’d say, “if you want to have a strong foundation, you need to learn Western classical music.” It was just a wrong idea for a person who wants to play Iron Maiden. They gave my poor brother a classical guitar to play Bach on. He was curious about other kinds of music and wanted to learn all the details about everything in music, so what I mean by academic is that he went after learning music through self-teaching, and watching movies about music, and not that he went to school for learning music.
Consequently, it seems that Behzad has a lifelong relationship with his music, and he does not consider studying music to be musically involved per se. Behzad’s approach to music-making and learning was “folk-style,” as he remarked, copying by ear the songs he enjoyed the most, doodling on his guitar, and creating songs together with his fellow members in Sarakhs, a situation also illuminated by Green (2002). More specifically, what Behzad’s stories revealed were involvement with communities of musical practice (Barrett, 2005) where “the nature of expertise can be best understood by shifting the focus from an individual’s cognitive processes to ‘the relational network’ of people who are taking part in shared activities” (Partti, 2012, p. 7). At the time, Behzad could not read the chords or charts; all he could do was to emulate the chords by ear and try to sing in tune. Behzad’s music learning was truly informal in the sense that he had never taken any lessons or instruction from a teacher. He learned through his peers and his own hard work.
In the interviews, Behzad provided a deep understanding of the ways he approached the composition of his songs and especially his lyrics. Not having a rock role model in the country (Robertson, 2012), writing Persian lyrics became a difficult yet rewarding task, as the meter and rhythm of the Persian language is different from that of English, the original language of rock. It was through trial and error, and positive feedback from his friends, especially K, that Behzad wrote lyrics. Behzad also taught himself to record, mix, and master his own songs. It all happened through an aesthetic decision to create an experimental experience with sound in B-Band’s second album. He mentioned, I know that it does not sound mature enough, but I felt I needed to do this. I just didn’t want to limit myself to acoustic sounds. I was craving for the sound of the synth and drum machine. I bought a midi controller, Ableton, and a high-quality sound card. I’ve also upgraded my laptop.
Referring to a DIY approach to music-making, Behzad continues, I carefully studied how other bands used these technologies. I wanted to know, for example, how to create that particular sound that makes their music amazing. I love to work with different plug-ins. These are all the techniques of electronic music. For example, you know that they call it Gate. And then I go and read about Gate and learn that you can Gate the lines so that they all start and end at the same time. It gives the listener a feeling of a sync and machinist music, like dance music. When you have a listening model, you can use it to your advantage. I really like Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode. I emulate their sounds as much as I can, and I don’t think it is a negative thing. These bands are too big not to let the rest of the people imitate their music. They proudly say that they themselves followed the 60s and 70s bands.
Behzad’s music education practices may not seem new to weathered music educators and music education scholars fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of an informal approach to music education. What is refreshing and unique in Behzad’s music education, however, is his far-reaching stance toward life and human beings while learning and making music and art, “seek[ing] an ongoing dialogue and acknowledge[ing] the complex, continually-changing nature of ethical endeavors” (Kapalka Richerme, 2017, p. 422). Indeed, Behzad calls his music-making and learning and genre of his music moosighi-e-marâmi, rather than underground or unofficial Persian rock music, the common Persian terminology for such music. Marâm, a difficult cultural construct to decipher in the Iranian understanding, refers to trust, sacrifice, loyalty without expectations, and bonding. Thus, moosighi-e-marâmi is a kind of music-making habit that entails conviction, human relationships, reliance on other musicians, and devotion rather than the concept of fame and fortune or sex-drugs-and-rock‘n’roll with which rock music is commonly associated. Behzad, frequently undermining himself as a “true musician,” has a deep and vast understanding of musicianship and arts in their relational sense—a moral cosmopolitan understanding, an understanding that in Bauman’s (2016) words comprises horizons of knowledge, drawn respectively by languages deployed by all parts of humanity meeting and entering conversation—languages that each of the parts deploy in order, with their help, to grasp, to make sense of and accommodate the world they live in. (p. 114)
Behzad’s music education then becomes his life, not a hobby nor a profession, but an all-consuming human endeavor, building toward “global affinities and solidarities through an irregular assortment of near and distant experiences and neither assumes nor denies the value of its universality” (Appadurai, 2013, p. 198).
Behzad is adamant that music for him is “all about friendships,” a “communicative practise that extend one’s own cultural horizons,” (Appadurai, 2013, p. 213) and that the genre of music he practices, learns, and enjoys holds lesser value than the friendships he creates along the way. I should note that there are two distinct words for friendship in Persian: doosti is a general kind of friendship where people are kind to one another, and the other, refâghat, refers to a deeper and more intimate understanding of friendship. Behzad refers to the latter: If you employ a sessional musician (considered a professional musician), you can pay them and ask them to play anything. But when I create a band, the relationships are more important to me, I embrace the special connections I have with them and they with me. The experiences that you share together, the trips you take together, and the collective behaviors that you form with one another matter greatly when you make your music.
This understanding reinforces Allsup and Westerlund’s (2012) ideal that a moral obligation is inherent in any good music education, and music is only one source of growth in educating musically. Behzad continues, I don’t see my band mates as my drummer, or my bass player so that I pay them and they leave. They are my friends. It’s always friendship first, then music! I never look at people as musicians. I never tell them: “since you play well, let’s play together.” We first have that friendship, then play music.
What is, thus, the most intriguing about Behzad and his music-making is his love of human interaction. Although music has a special place in Behzad’s life, without meaningful relations with other beings he was not able to continue his music. Behzad provided the video for their song, Ye chizi bede be man (“Hit me with anything”) as an example: one of their friends offered to create a music video at no cost. This powerful video made B-Band relatively well known among some groups of Iranians. So, when Behzad discusses moosighi-e-marâmi, he deeply believes in intimate camaraderie: When I was in Iran, everyone was taking responsibility for a task without any expectations. One was a graphic designer and was making an album cover, another had a studio that would let us record our songs, one was a filmmaker and was creating our music videos, everyone was helping. So, I concluded that there is no reason to complain about anyone.
Hansen’s (2011) characterization of cosmopolitanism in education illuminates this situation that even though people vary in their treasured values, the fact that they share the capacity to value demonstrates a fundamental need to find meaning in life against a desire to merely exist.
The video, Ye chizi bede be man, Hit me with anything (B-band بی بند, 2012) masterfully portrays this concept. B-Band is adamant about remaining apolitical. As their website states, “
The video is shot in black and white, portraying a bleak and desolate prison. All the members of the band are in their own separate solitary cells, twiddling their thumbs or looking down on the ground, while the ticking of a mechanical metronome is heard. When the first riff of the song begins, the eye color of the singer turns to bright yellow, and an electric guitar appears in his cell. Instantly, the drums appear at the drummer’s cell, followed by the bass guitar of the bass player, and the guitar of the lead guitar player. They hold on to their instruments and start playing their song. One minute into the song, a new character appears: the prison doctor. Representing officialdom, he wears a white coat and looks at the ticking of the mechanical metronome on his desk. The metronome symbolizes the imposed tempo set by the authorities. During this time, the band members are still performing on their instruments, but each one is in his own cell. The camera moves to the doctor’s office again, depicting him intensely writing something in his notes. At the same time, the lyrics—translated from Persian to English by the band in the video—also build up to the chorus of the song: Further and further away with every breath My dreams living on, outside the cage Tired of being tired Tired of seeing tired Doctor, listen to me! My whole system is a mess Need to shut down for a while Just so I can make a fresh start again Leave me alone, put yourself in my place Don’t ask for explanations, just observe from the peephole!
Right at this moment, the doctor with his pen in his mouth opens the peephole to one of the cells. Once observed, the singer’s electric guitar immediately vanishes from his hands. He is left playing air guitar, singing the chorus in a distorted and melancholic voice, “give me a hit of anything so I can take a break from this world for a while.”
Following the singer’s miming, the drummer, the bass player, and the lead guitarist also mime-play, as their instruments too have disappeared. This may refer to the illegality of showing any instruments on public TV, physically and representationally silencing citizens by forbidding them from playing their instruments and making their voices heard.
Why doesn’t the little vendor boy, ever run out of batteries? Why doesn’t the fortune of the little vendor girl, ever become true? Doctor, listen to me! I’m tired of repeating my words I need to shut down for a while Just so I can make a fresh start again Leave me alone, put yourself in my place Don’t ask for explanations, just observe from the peephole!
At this moment, all the band members swallow the medicine that the doctor gave them. This time not only their instruments but also their bodies start to gradually dissolve and disappear, leaving the doctor surprised when the pen drops from his mouth. The doctor, flabbergasted, drinks the same medicine that he had prescribed. The chorus repeats: “Give me the hit of anything so I can take a break from this world for a while.” The chorus is sung again with more volume while the band members dissolve. They were finally hit with something so that they could break from this world for a while; however, the video ends with the doctor dissolving like sand and vanishing. The band members do not disappear. Left in a purgatory-like state, viewers are uncertain what will happen to inmates. It is for the audience to decide whether they see the ending as a sign of hope or continuous misery.
The band members actively, creatively, and collectively, though each within his own cell, came out of their constant state of visibility to turn this power structure to their benefit. They kept playing their instruments together and made the very medicine imposed upon them into a weapon against their prison guard, to win the game and turn the power hierarchy. Once again, we can see and hear the human connection within and through this video: “a condition that makes the choice between survival and extinction dependent on our capability to ‘live cheek and jowl,’ in mutual peace, solidarity and cooperation, amid strangers who may or may not hold opinions and preferences similar to ours” (Bauman, 2016, p. 72).
Human connection: a cosmopolitan music education
Even though music education scholars have pointedly embraced ethical matters in music education within the global context, to the extent that the journal, Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, has dedicated two complete issues on ethics in music education, 2 only a handful of music education scholars have paid attention to the concept of cosmopolitanism with all its manifestations in practices and research (Bates, 2014; Bradley, 2006; Hebert & Kertz-Welzel, 2016; Heimonen, 2012; Ho & Law, 2006; Kallio & Partti, 2013; Kapalka Richerme, 2017; Kertz-Welzel, 2018, Partti, 2012; Schmidt, 2013a, 2013b). While keeping in mind that the concept of cosmopolitanism tends to be read in negative and elitist ways, it is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon (Appiah, 2007) that is worth exploring in educational settings, as it can illuminate much about what humans share despite their differences. I have aimed to highlight the significance of the human connection—a notable feature of moral cosmopolitanism, and by extension, cosmopolitanism from below—inherent in, and possibly the most prominent aspect of music education practices, regardless of their position in the formal–informal spectrum, or community versus school music practices. Through Behzad’s stories, I demonstrated that one can consider music education through an alternate lens, a more holistic lens, for that matter. Behzad’s music education was a cultural education learning not only about and through music but also internalizing the value of other art forms, histories, politics, economics, sociologies, human endeavors, and human interactions and connections through his own localities and his hosts’ localities. Behzad’s stories encourage thinking differently about the profession of music education not only theoretically but practically. Theoretically, and continuing this line of thinking in music education scholarship, music education has the power and potential to redress the cruelties that we humans impinge upon ourselves, as “music education is part of the very personal and individual essence of what it means to be human” (Heimonen, 2012, p. 75). Practically, music educators in any educational setting can teach music contextually and in ways related to and, perhaps, focused on positive human interactions, intimate and direct communications, and human fellowships. For instance, instead of neutrally focusing on the sonic content of various musical practices, genres, and pedagogies situated within every teaching setting, music teachers in collaboration with students can select a shared capacity of human experience such as occasions of jovial celebrations (i.e., weddings, births, seasonal celebrations), somber gatherings for funerals, or loss of a loved one, and political and economic events including wars, migration, and transmission of leadership, and so many more to explore the relational interchanges between humans—and non-humans (Feld, 1990, 2015; Recharte, 2019)—and examine how individuals of all walks of life and in various corners of the world make sense of their experiences in and through sound and music. Selecting wedding ceremonies as a core concept in a music teaching and learning context, for example, questions such as “What kinds of sounds are being heard at wedding ceremonies in the Southern provinces of Iran or within the Kazakh communities of Western Mongolia, or Presbyterian churches of North America?” “Who are the individuals involved in creating those sounds?” “What are their roles within the ceremony?” “How is the sound and music being created, used, and circulated?” not only open the space for further exploration and inquisitive practices toward learning but also highlight the human element in relation to his or her surrounding embedded in any musical practice. In this way, the supremacy of just one legitimate practice of music with its related sociology and codes of behavior would be disassembled and instead a plethora of understandings, experiences, and proficiencies come to the fore. Appiah (2007) said it well when he noted: “cosmopolitanism shouldn’t be seen as some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community . . . we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association” (p. xix).
Behzad’s experiences of war as a child and its aftermath on his emotional and intellectual being and music education translate into a lifestyle, an “affective education, referring to the education of emotions, values, and ethical sensibilities” (Heimonen, 2012, p. 72). Understanding the value and ephemerality of human life due to these severe war experiences, Behzad fully and richly integrated the human connections within his music education. As his music education tells us, “we cannot theorize and design for humanity, we can only practice humanity” (Todd, 2012, pp. 83–84). It is only through our humanity and efforts, sense of self-worth, and care for others that we might be able to avoid, ever so slightly, the human suffering happening around us. Thus, I propose that music education can sometimes become a means of affection, at other times empathy and solidarity, and a lifestyle overall that arises as the herald of a cosmopolitan collective imperative.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Deborah Bradley for her helpful observations on earlier drafts of this article.
Author’s note
Portions of this article were presented at the International Society for Music Education 2016, Glasgow, UK.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
